


her kind

by princegrantaire



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bittersweet Ending, F/F, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 13:01:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20258509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princegrantaire/pseuds/princegrantaire
Summary: Joker’s smiling when they part, eerie in the moonlight. Her lips are much too red. Bryce relaxes back against the headboard and doesn’t stop looking, trying to take it all in.(Bryce Wayne and the Joker have got a good thing going and those never last too long.)





	her kind

**Author's Note:**

> part of mine and @slaapkat's fem!batjokes au! a sequel to my [previous fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17463341) about the gorls, set about a year later. not much context needed but for visuals, i've drawn [bryce](https://ufonaut.tumblr.com/post/186747579043/alfred-voice-miss-wayne-please-click-on-it) and [joker](https://ufonaut.tumblr.com/post/185797323193/maybe-definitive-fem-joker-design-for-mine-and) a couple of times!
> 
> hope you enjoy!! endless thanks to @slaapkat for being the bestest buddy in the world when i'm suffering from extreme writer's block and @permaclown for being the most supportive gf ever. lov ya! <3

“Anyone ever tell you that, uh, you kinda look like the Bat?”

Bryce makes a sort of noncommittal grunt because she’s got the Joker in her lap and for once, at 3 AM on a night that’s almost definitely crawling with crime, the so-called Bat is the least of her concerns. She’s gotten Joker’s shirt _untucked_. That’d taken more work and determination than most of her career.

And yet, against all reason, Joker persists. She’s peering curiously at Bryce, like they’ve not spent the past half hour pressed up as close as some remaining sense of decency allows.

“Yeah, you kinda do. Maybe it’s the jaw?” she says, tilting her head. Bryce doesn’t bother pointing out that’s the one and only part of the Caped Crusader that’s even remotely visible at the best of times. Full-face masks hadn’t been much of a hit with already terrified civilians. Joker doesn’t need to know that. In fact, Joker doesn’t need to know anything other than the fact that Bryce would quite like to hurry things along before the guilt hits.

“Mhm.”

That’s all Bryce’s willing to give Joker before she’s leaning in for another kiss, hands delving under her shirt, precariously close to brushing against too-noticeable ribs, some broken and never quite healed right. Sometimes Bryce doesn’t _want _to see the chalk-white expanse of Joker’s skin, can’t let herself wonder how much she’s responsible for.

Tonight isn’t one of those nights.

Joker’s smiling when they part, eerie in the moonlight. Her lips are much too red. Bryce relaxes back against the headboard and doesn’t stop looking, trying to take it all in. Mostly compelled by a dangerous and ever-growing fondness, she brushes a hand through Joker’s green hair, usually much too short and much too choppy to look like anything other than a particularly severe case of bedhead.

It’s even shorter now.

She’s yet to ask about Arkham.

“Did you know the Bat’s a lady?” Joker continues, even as Bryce draws her close again and kisses her neck. It’s _possibly _more of a bite.

Every brush of lips tends to be visible on Joker, especially up here, higher than her shirt collar ever reaches, but it gets a giggle out of her and the Dark Knight’s discarded in favour of clutching at Bryce’s soft waist. For now, that’s as good as it gets. “Wait,” she mumbles, muffled against Joker.

Bryce pulls back then, even if Joker’s chasing remnants of warmth, moving even closer. She’s cold, even here and now, and there’s something deceptively _fragile _in the skeletal body Bryce’s found herself holding, clumsy and all lanky in the sort of way one’s usually expected to grow into but, as with most things in the realm of the _usual_, Joker doesn’t seem to have ever gotten the memo. Bryce had underestimated her once and never again, she’s got the scars to prove it. “How’d you know that?”

They’ve been doing this for too long. Two months, maybe. Bryce’s tried not to keep count, which isn’t all that hard when _never again_ loses all meaning. The first time had been an accident, that she’s certain of.

She’d just gotten back from patrol, bone-tired and aching, late enough that it’d easily pass for early. Kim and Damian must’ve been in bed already, as they are now, because school nights are non-negotiable and Bryce likes to think she’s kept up some semblance of responsibility all these years. The night had ended with one Harley Quinn in cuffs and a clown floating in the harbour, what she could’ve never accounted for was the Joker showing up at Bryce Wayne’s front door a couple of hours later, looking like a drowned rat and bleeding through her clothes.

And that’s the thing, Bryce couldn’t have let her bleed out on a stranger’s doorstep. _Weren’t you at that gala? _Joker had said, like the charity ball in question hadn’t taken place approximately five years ago.

Pure chance.

That’s all it had been.

Joker still claims the manor had been chosen at random, close enough to the river that the walk hadn’t been too grueling and she’d merely hoped for a friendly face, knives stashed all over notwithstanding. Bryce believes her, partially because she’d looked thoroughly rattled by the lack of cops, mostly because Joker had taken it upon herself to _thank her_, more grateful than she could say, intimately so.

She hadn’t said a word about the scars on Bryce’s thighs, criss-crossing through a fine dusting of dark hair and much too pale against the rest of her. _Skiing accident_, Bryce had offered anyway because she’s never quite gotten the hang of being the Wayne heiress.

After that, it’d just kept happening.

One night, the two of them cuddled up tight, Joker had called the manor _safe_, somewhere in-between the asylum’s haunted halls and her own lacklustre hideaways. Bryce is yet to figure out how to apologise for the black eye the Bat had subjected her to then. In fact, it’s probably a little too late for life-altering confessions.

“I-- sorta short-circuited her voice thing once,” Joker admits, back to the matter at hand and vaguely sheepish.

Oh.

_That_.

Last year, in the grand scheme of miniature betrayals and major tragedies Bryce encounters on a daily basis, Joker knowing her gender had barely registered. Soon after that, she’d suffered through a particularly bad Bane-induced concussion and that’d been a whole lot more memorable than the momentary inconvenience of asking Lucius for a new voice modulator.

Clearly, Joker doesn’t feel the same way.

“You know,” Bryce starts, though she’s interrupted by another kiss from Joker, who finishes quickly and smiles and brushes Bryce’s own short hair off her forehead as if to say _go on_. She does. “I don’t think the Bat is hiding that she’s a woman or anything like that. Doesn’t seem like it to me, anyways.”

No, _she’s_ certainly not hiding anything at all. Bryce doesn’t, by any means, mind being known as Batman but she will, if necessary, admit to a preference for the World’s Greatest Detective. In an ideal world, Bryce wouldn’t be referred to as anything at all and she could go on her merry way as a shadow and nothing more but it’s not an ideal world and Gotham’s given its Caped Crusader more names than she cares to know. The Bat fits nicely.

“Well, she sure had me fooled,” Joker says, quiet, abruptly crestfallen.

Bryce can’t have that.

She tilts Joker’s chin up and kisses her, deep and satisfying. Joker always gets a little frantic here, bony hands cupping Bryce’s face. It’s nice. Nic_er_ than nights on moonlit rooftops at any rate, not that the rush of adrenaline as she gets Joker’s suit trousers unbuttoned and unzipped one-handed is all that different. She’s still in the arms of a--

Monsters have no place here.

It’s _just _Joker, who laughs too loud and whose genuine smiles aren’t razor-sharp and who’s pulled away only to clumsily shimmy out of her suit trousers and is, apparently, wearing men’s briefs underneath. Bryce stares.

“Is that--” She drags Joker back into bed by her waist, both of them tethering on the edge of unspoken amusement. “Where’d you even find those?”

A shrug is the only answer she gets. 

Joker’s briefs proudly display the Bat logo, yellow on black. Bryce can’t imagine that’s particularly legal. Even beyond that, it’s hard not to look. There’s a painful-looking bruise stretching up from one sharp hip, peeking out from underneath her waistband. Something that looks like an old crocodile bite just below a knee. The dozens upon dozens of bullet wounds, taser burns and batarang cuts.

All Bryce can ever think is _I did that_.

Maybe not intentionally, maybe not even personally but she never did manage to save the nameless young woman from ACE Chemicals all those years ago.

Since she's in no mood to examine the strange warmth in her chest or any upcoming guilt trips, Bryce does the logical thing and gets to work on Joker’s shirt. Halfway through, they melt into another kiss. 

“Feelin’ kinda underdressed over here,” Joker points out, like Bryce hasn’t been down to her underwear since before they’d started, ready for bed yet badly hoping for closeness.

There’s no hesitation here.

Bryce laughs, much too fond, and proceeds to try and chuck off her t-shirt, only to get all tangled up in it as she’s about to tug it over her head. Currently plunged into darkness, nothing more than the lower half of her face left to see, it occurs to Bryce she’s a great deal less uncoordinated in the bat-suit. Something to think about it, probably.

She hears a gasp and the charade falls to pieces.

It’s the scars. _Fuck_, it’s gotta be the scars. She should’ve drawn the curtains, like every other night. There’s too much light. Bryce had just gotten so caught up in--

“You’re--”

Joker’s hands press against her mouth, as if she can’t bear to say it. A slight tremor seems to have intervened. Bryce notes all the changes, when she’s once again free to look, with a sort of dawning terror she doesn’t often partake in.

“You’re _her_,” Joker gasps out but she’s not looking at the scars at all. In fact, her green eyes are fixed on Bryce’s mouth. “You’re her,” she repeats, breathless, and stumbles backwards off the bed, uncaring as she finds herself on the floor, scrambling for her pants. She looks-- _wounded_. Bryce’s never seen anything quite like it. Her heart aches.

And Bryce just...sits there, shirtless, breathing hard. The world narrows down to this moment alone. She’s gone clammy, cold. Frozen, really.

“Joker, wait,” is all she manages, strained. “We can-- talk. We can talk about this, right? What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

_That’s_ razor-sharp. For a change, she’s facing the Joker and there’s no cowl to hide behind. Joker’s eyes dart to the window and Bryce has seen that before, more times than she can count. All at once, she misses what could’ve been, Joker warm and wet underneath her, her head between those too pale thighs. Everything about Joker is _too _something. She can handle that. The half-feral look in Joker’s eyes? Not so much. Bryce knows that desperation, she’s lived through it.

“I’m not, I’m not, Joker, please, let’s just talk,” she finds herself pleading, as if they’ve ever _talked _before.

But god, Bryce wants this, beyond the nights spent together, even beyond that faint streak of rebellion that had never quite left, long past her teenage years. Alfred had found Joker’s jacket after that first night. The _look _he’d given Bryce, the silent accusations. It’d been worth it then. Hell, it’d been reason enough to welcome Joker back next time she’d come calling.

It’s so much more now.

Backed into a corner, Joker sounds like she’s well on her way to hyperventilating. Bryce has seen her work through panic attacks with a knife in her hand. She’s always there, on the brink. “So, what was it?” Joker asks, strangled by a sob caught in her throat. “Decided to take one for the team and keep that pesky Joker occupied?”

And she’s rummaging through her pockets for answers that aren’t likely to ever come. _No weapons _had seemed like such an easy promise to keep, Bryce wonders whether Joker’s regretting it now, whether she’s picturing blood on the hardwood floor.

Bryce is.

She doesn’t want to, much too close to the Joker she thought she knew, but she sees it all the same. 

“I didn’t know--” she starts to say but Bryce has never been good with words and the right ones never come. Here, too, is something of the girl in the alley. A loss too great to account for just now. “I am but I’m not just...her, I--” 

_This is real, it was always real_ is what Bryce really wants to say.

Joker’s scratching her own wrist open with the effort of standing still; a strange silhouette in the dark, her shirt buttoned up wrong, kiss-swollen lips, so very wide eyes. Bryce wants her close again. Then, before another word can make it out, Joker shakes her head, desperate like her movements aren’t entirely her own, and darts out the open window.

It’s the same way she’d climbed in to begin with. Bryce lets her, heart clenching as the crash below and then the rapid footsteps fade into the night.

\---

If Bryce is home by 4 AM, Alfred will say _Early night, miss?_, like he does every time, and she won’t quite know whether he’s joking. She never does. The routine strikes her as dull tonight, barely past midnight and she’s feeling the weight of all sixteen years of uninterrupted patrol.

Not much happening tonight.

She’d stopped a robbery on Bolland Ave., a mugging perplexingly close to the GCPD and that’s about it. If Bryce hadn’t bothered to pull any punches, well, it’s hardly her fault her mind’s elsewhere. Perched up high on a gargoyle, it’s starting to look like there’s nothing for her in the city below.

It’s been three weeks. She’s thought of little else.

That’s when she catches a flash of purple on a nearby rooftop. It’s hard to hear anything over her heartbeat.

Joker waves at her and it’s no invitation to grapple over there but it’s enough.

It’s _enough_.

Bryce waves back.

**Author's Note:**

> \- title from "her kind" by anne sexton, which is a very good very fitting poem for this here au!
> 
> talk to me @ufonaut! always eager to hear fem au concepts x


End file.
